“Haptonomy demonstrates — in prenatal life and especially at the moment of birth — the primordial and decisive influence of the affecti[v]e interrelational mother-child contact on the development and security of the latter. The same goes for the safety of the mother. At the same time, the father’s role in this contact and the affective-confirming interaction inherent in this contact, are of a fundamental importance. Together, the parents set up a basic state of security for the child, an essential state which gives a solid start to the founding of his autonomy and the initiation of his authentic identity. A state of security, initiated and founded directly after birth, in the first minutes of life, outside the womb, by a very specific act of detachment. An act preferably carried out by the father.

Nowadays a progressive lack of affective confirmation can be observed. Youth goes astray, deprived from the very beginning and during the first few years of life of the foundation of security which this confirmation establishes.

Never has the number of juvenile suicides been so high and it continues to progress in an alarming way; never have so many adolescents — they are still children — lost their way in the unreality of the world of drug addicts, punks, skinheads, etc., and never has the syndrome of the “borderline state” — the sociosis of our era — been so significant in human society. Also the “insanitas moralis” the amplified psychopathy of our era, has become an evil which poisons society with acts of violence, rapes, murders etc., because of a lack of development of a moral inner conscience which is charecterised by a feeling of personal responsibility. The evil develops progressively and quickly in a disturbing way, like an illness which resists all interventions.

Haptonomy shows that the lack of a precocious affective confirmation, which should already be initiated during prenatal life in the mother’s womb, and followed up immediately after the birth with an identical accompaniment, is a dominating factor at the origin of this disturbing development.”